After a little searching, I though I'd put this up here as I could no find any info specific to this topic.

I have a 700mhz gigabyte radeon HD 5450 that came with a noisy HTPC build that I'm currently silencing (Silverstone Grandia 05 and a big shruiken so far). However for now the budget has been exhausted. And it's very evident that at the moment the fan on the radeon is the noisest part of the computer.

Can anybody give me any guidance on how I could go about silencing this? For a budget of under $20 (I'm in Canada, so postage up here would need to be factored).

Is there a more hack type solution, could I unplug the fan and clock the card back to 650 for now, is that possible with these cards to underclock them? I mean I at most play 720p video with this card.

What about VGA coolers from Ebay? Anybody had any experience with them? There seems to be a heatpipe one from china but I have no idea about mounting etc...

Super simple cheap solution -- disconnect/remove the existing fan & hook up a bigger quieter fan to blow on the cooler. Use zap straps, insulated wire, whatever. The card is said to consume just 19 watts of power under load -- this should be a cinch to cool. Especially if HD video play is the most demanding task. If you're handy, an old aluminum CPU heatsink from P2/3 days could easily be repurposed as a silent/fanless cooler for this card. The GPU should have a thermal sensor you can use to monitor temperatures via the ATI/AMD Catalyst control center or whatever temp motoring software of your choice.

Super simple cheap solution -- disconnect/remove the existing fan & hook up a bigger quieter fan to blow on the cooler. Use zap straps, insulated wire, whatever. The card is said to consume just 19 watts of power under load -- this should be a cinch to cool. Especially if HD video play is the most demanding task. If you're handy, an old aluminum CPU heatsink from P2/3 days could easily be repurposed as a silent/fanless cooler for this card. The GPU should have a thermal sensor you can use to monitor temperatures via the ATI/AMD Catalyst control center or whatever temp motoring software of your choice.

Thanks. I'll give that a whirl and post the results and pics once I'm done.

If the fins of the existing heatsink are rigid enough and with the right spacing its possible to attach the replacement fan using screws. A little easier to do than using zip ties etc. A 80mm fan permanently running at 1000-1200 rpm should be more than enough for your card and very quiet too.

So I'm all done. Got a zalman 92mm fan from freegeek vancouver ($2!) and a header I moved the pins to make 5v. Nice and slow but still reasonable airflow. There was just enough clearance under the heat sink for the zip ties I had so install was pretty simple.

I'm sitting in my living room, and the fridge compressor is MUCH louder than the HTPC. This was not the case before. Color me happy! I just did a very scientific test with my iphone RTA software and an eyeballed 1 meter level with the front of the PC and I'm getting about 48db... which is more than fine by me for now...

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